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U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker Delivers Remarks at the 96th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Association

Last week, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker traveled to New Orleans to speak at the Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), where she discussed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service’s (NWS) Evolve Initiative. The AMS Annual Meeting brings together the leading members of the nation’s weather, water, and climate communities to discuss timely issues facing those in the weather enterprise.

Addressing high-impact weather is one of the great imperatives of our time. Society is becoming increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events like the ones that took place over the holiday season, with some 39 percent of Americans living in areas of high-susceptibility to high-impact weather. Bad weather also saps our economy, disrupting everything from air travel to farm work and stalling whole supply chains. When communities are hard hit by storms, 25 percent of the businesses affected never reopen.

Society’s increased vulnerability to extreme weather, the acceleration of technology, the ever-increasing availability of data, and the sheer number of actors in the weather industry require an evolution in the way we do business.

The NWS’ Evolve Initiative is a recognition of the 21st century challenges and opportunities facing our nation and the world. As the authoritative voice for safeguarding our nation, NWS Evolve Initiative will work to integrate the science we undertake with the community we are committed to serving. Through Evolve, NWS is improving our ability to put life-saving data into the hands of our government partners and decision makers so can will evacuate hospitals, alert schools, close roads and flood flashpoints, and bus senior citizens out of harm’s way.

Secretary Pritzker noted that, beyond its own critical role in safeguarding America, there exists considerable space and latitude for innovation across the entire weather enterprise community. One way NOAA is working as a creative collaborator is through their Big Data project, which partners with industry and academic leaders to make NOAA’s data more easily accessible.

The Secretary urged all actors, including NOAA and other federal agencies, as well as members of private, academic and nonprofit sectors to continue to collaborate to build a more weather-ready nation.

For example, the National Weather Service works with your local radio and TV stations to provide top-quality data on weather. In the following video, Baltimore Meteorologist Ava Marie explains how she uses NOAA data to prepare her forecasts.

AVA MARIE: My name is Ava Marie. I'm the morning meteorologist here at WBAL TV. I don't think people realizewhere their weather data comes from. They get the forecast, possibly on their mobile device, from their TV, and they don't really think about everything that went in to make that forecast. I sift through tons and tons of data, whether it be satellite information,radar, weather observations. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without all the data provided from the National Weather Service and NOAA. When it comes to making a forecast for our local area, we use our own knowledge and expertise to fine-tune that forecast for our viewers, but the initial data is really reliant on the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, the Storm Prediction Center, all those major entities that have a lot of knowledge and experience in those specialized types of weather, and we really look to them as the authority on those types of situations. So this is what's known as the computer model. People have probably started to hear that word more and more often. And basically, these are run by supercomputers, many of which are run by the government, in order to let us know what these supercomputers think is going to happen with the weather. So they are ingesting tons of data, whether it's through satellite, radar, weather observations, and using mathematics, trying to interpret what might happen out in the future. It displays it in a map here. And so these are what we use to analyze the overall weather patterns, how we think they're going to change, and therefore how it applies to the forecast. As a meteorologist at a TV station, I think it's really important that we have a great relationship with our local forecasting offices, whether it's being able to contact them directly through the chat groups, or reading their forecast discussions. That information isvery important to the decisions that I make each and every day.